Barba Higuera’s own story begins something like this: Había una vezin the 1970s, a young girl growing up in central California had a bigger imagination than the surrounding oil fields.
In the former “sunset town” of Taft, a small town at the foot of the San Joaquin Valley, Barba Higuera says she stood out as a Latina, navigating between two cultures and two languages. This personal story is reflected in The Last Cuentiste, where Spanish words – piñon, panadería, pobrecito – and sentence fragments are interspersed with English. Instead of italicizing or translating them, Barba Higuera weaves them into Petra’s stories and stream of consciousness, much like the “Spanglish” she speaks herself.
“I wrote the book as I heard it in my head,” she says. “I’ve worked really hard to try and allow someone to be in my mind and see what it’s like to navigate in two languages.” With contextual clues, she adds, English-speaking readers can understand what’s going on and what’s being said, “to show that we’re not that far apart, that we can figure things out and understand each other.”
Like Petra, Barba Higuera grew up among storytellers: her abuelita – Petra’s grandmother, Lita, plays an important role in the book – and her father were adept at embellishing age-old tales that had been passed down from generation to generation.
And just like Petra, Barba Higuera’s imagination ran wild. She used to sneak to the cemetery behind her house to ponder the headstones and tell stories about the people who rested there. Once, when asked by a neighbor what she had been up to the night before, Barba Higuera told her that a UFO had landed in the front yard. “I didn’t intend it to be a lie,” says Barba Higuera. “It was just my imagination wanting to go somewhere different.”
Now 52 years old, Barba Higuera still gives free rein to her imagination. Recently, while digging in the garden outside her home in Issaquah, where she lives with her husband and one of her four children, she found a rusty metal pulley. “And by the time someone got home…I had made up this whole story in my head about what it really was,” she says. “It couldn’t be right from the time they built the house – it was from a mining camp.” And that greenbelt near the house? “It’s haunted because I hear noises. They’re not raccoons, because that couldn’t be the logical answer,” laughs Barba Higuera.
It wasn’t until she was 40 that she began to let these fantastic ideas “spin out of control” in novels. “Writing is a craft and I had to learn it as I got older. But I’ve always been a storyteller,” she says.
Now, she says, writing has become her coping mechanism. “People will say: are you writing these books for children? Of course, they end there. But I think maybe I write them for my child self,” she says. “I think mentally sometimes I’m still here, I’m still that kid living in the desert who needs to escape to somewhere else.”
But fair warning: Barba Higuera’s spirit sometimes seeks out some pretty spooky places. The Last Waiter doesn’t shy away from dark matter: from a comet destroying Earth to brainwashing and “purge” (murder by another name) – despite an ultimately hopeful message, it’s a bit heavy book, admits the author.
“I think it should come with a bit of a warning for young people,” she says. Still, she says, “sometimes we needed these books when we were kids to help us cry and process our emotions.”
Barba Higuera is already working on two new books, one of which is another magical realist dystopian mid-level novel in which animal-shaped drones carry the consciousness of children who are banished from society.
“They don’t know where they’re from, they don’t know what they look like, they don’t know gender, they don’t know race, they don’t know age. We sometimes judge people on their looks , but I want to show how they all carry their own story,” she says.
A bit like in The Last Waiterthings can get dark and dicey, but Barba Higuera is an expert at peering into our souls, where she always finds a glimmer of hope and humanity.
This note of hope was exactly what she needed to write the book, says Barba Higuera. She wrote the final chapters at the start of the pandemic, waking up early each morning before going to her optometrist’s office, fearful of catching COVID-19 and bringing the virus home.
Looking back, says Barba Higuera, The Last CuentistThe open to interpretation but somewhat happy ending was his way of “imposing my hope that we’re going to get through this and that everything will be fine.”
For Petra,este cuento se ha acabado— but for Barba Higuera, new stories are just beginning.